Photographs, Pens, and Print: William Morris and the Technologies of Typography

Abstract:In November 1888, influential printer and engraver Emery Walker gave a lecture on historical typefaces to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, which featured lantern slide enlargements of early printed typographic examples. These enlargements prompted William Morris to try his hand at type design. This article reconsiders Morris’s turn to typography and printing through a focus on both the scale at which he designed, and the combined luxuries of intensive study and contemporary technology that allowed him to do so. In examining both the enlargement technologies that made Morris’s designs possible, and the vital role of handwriting in his type design, the interdependence of craft and technology at the Kelmscott Press emerges.